Death of an Escort (3 page)

It was a fake camera.

"It's a fake," I said.

He didn't look at me.

Viciously, I threw it at him, and he tried to
duck. It conked him on the shoulder, and he deserved it. The
twit.

I went out to my car and decided to head to
the local Walmart. They had a big fabric section. More than likely,
it was a dead end, but I felt that I should follow up on this
button and see where it would lead.

It was only minutes away, and I pulled into
the parking lot moments later. The fabric and sewing section was
all the way in the back.

And as I got close, I started to feel weird.
You never saw guys in that back part. It was for women, and old
women at that.

I waited in the main aisle until I didn't see
any guys. Then I ducked into the area. There was a clerk up ahead.
She was old and white-haired.

"Excuse me, ma'am?" I said loudly, in case
her hearing was failing. Hey, she looked old.

She turned around. "Yes, sir? Can I help
you?"

I dug the button out of my pocket and held it
out for her on my flat palm. "Can you tell me anything about
this?"

She took it from me and dropped it. I picked
it up for her and put it back into her hand. Her knuckles were
enlarged with arthritis.

She turned it around and around and looked at
it. "We don't carry anything like this, sir," she said. "You could
try the fabric shop down the street. Jo Ann fabrics. They have just
about everything."

That sounded odd from someone at Walmart to
say, but I took the button back and said thanks. I went out and got
into my car and drove about half a mile down the main highway to
the Jo Ann fabric store.

Now, if I thought it was bad going into the
fabric section of a department store, this had to be a hundred
times worse. Here I was about to walk into a store devoted totally
to feminine things. Guys, not even gay ones, went into this
store.

But I had to, so I did. The first clerk
behind the counter directed me to someone further into the
store.

And that person called someone from the back
room. That person took it from me.

"I've seen some like this," she said. She
needed to lay off the cake, or whatever she'd been eating too much
of. She needed to get out and really do something and quit all the
sewing or whatever else she did that didn't involve any
activity.

"What can you tell me about it?" I asked.

"Not much," she said.

"Tell me all that you can, please," I
said.

"I can tell you to go to Jackie's Emporium.
She'd be able to help you with this."

"Jackie's Emporium?"

"A local store," she said. "You've probably
never been to it."

She got that right. "And you think they can
help me with this button?"

"I'm sure if it," she said. "Let me jot the
address down for you."

I wasn't so sure that Jackie or whoever at
this other store could help. It was a feeling I was getting after
being jostled from store to store, but I was going to check it out.
While at the same time I felt that going store to store was wasting
my time, I also felt that in some way I was getting closer to the
answer.

The answer may be, probably was, nothing I
wanted to hear and would be completely unhelpful, but I was going
to give it a shot anyway.

She came back with a note card and address on
it. I took the button back and the note card as well.

Off I went again. This store was deep in the
old, historic part of the downtown. I needed to get off the highway
and away from what was now the true downtown.

The old downtown was tight and everything was
made of stone and bricks. Iron rods stuck out from over tops of the
doors of the shops and wooden sides swung from them declaring the
name of the shop and often the proprietor's name as well.

I never shopped down here, but there was a
very loyal demographic that only came down here and kept these
shops alive and profitable. It tended to be an older demographic,
and they'd always lived here, and so had their parents before them.
It was a generational thing.

I found Jackie's Emporium, and there was an
open parking space in front of the store. I parked there and then
had to dig around for coins for the parking meter.

That's why I never came down here. It was
always a pain to pay for parking, but I found a dime and nickel.
That should cover it, I thought.

After paying for my parking, I went
inside.

Jackie, she was wearing a handmade name tag,
wasn't as old as I thought. In fact, she was probably about ten
years older than me or so, putting her in her very early
forties.

"Hello. How may I help you?"

"By telling everything you know about this
button," I said. "And hopefully you know something."

She looked at it. "You want to know about
this button?"

I did. That's why I'd said I did. "Yes, I
do," I said and tried to be nice about it.

"I can't tell you much," she said.

That's it. I wasn't chasing around with this
stupid button anymore. It was a dumb idea to begin with.

"But I know who made it," she said.

"You know who made it?" I asked. Now I was
doing it, repeating what had just been clearly stated. Maybe being
around fabrics did that to you.

"Yes," she said. "He comes in here and makes
them."

"Is he here now?"

"No, but he'll be here tomorrow," she said.
"He makes these by hand. Each one."

"Sounds expensive," I said.

"Fine quality often has a higher investment,"
she said. "Can I tell him to expect you tomorrow?"

I took out a business card. "I'll be here," I
said.

She read it. "A private investigator?"

I nodded and walked out before she could ask
any more questions. The meter said I had only a minute-and-a-half
left. I guess fifteen cents doesn't buy much time.

To get back to where my office was, I had to
do a u-turn and go back to the main highway. I don't have an
assistant, so I couldn't call the office to look something up for
me, so I had to go there myself.

My office is about four miles down at the far
end of the main highway, and I had to drive past all the button
stops that hadn't proved fruitful to get to my building.

It's not really my building. I have one
office in a building of a bunch of privately divided offices. It
would be cheaper to have office at home, but never, ever would I do
that.

I'm not going to make it easy for them to
find me, if they're still looking.

At my office I used the internet to look up
Carlie Smith here in town. She had an apartment address. I wrote it
lightly in pencil on the back of one of my business cards.

Then I used an online map service to map out
the quickest route there from where I was.

When I was done I shut the internet browser
down and completely cleared the history, cache, and cookies. Then I
disconnected from the proxy service that I had been using (SOCKS
proxy, not HTTP proxy as I felt the SOCKS proxy was more
secure).

Finally, I didn't shut the computer down, but
instead I started up a program that I had commissioned to be
created for me especially at eLance.com. It had cost about seven
hundred dollars and some guy in Virginia had programmed it for
me.

It was called Scrambler. When you delete a
file on your computer, it's not really gone. It sits there on your
hard drive, and anyone with an ounce of determination can get
it.

Call me paranoid, but I want no one being
able to tell what I'm up to on the computer. The scramble program
creates a bunch of nonsense files of varying size and deletes them
for as along as I set it to.

I leave it on the one hour setting. So, for
one hour now, it will run and be creating and deleting random,
gibberish files. That uses up all the hard drive space that the
recently deleted files were using.

It makes them unrecoverable, and covers my
tracks, like the SOCKS proxy hides my online activity.

Then after running for one hour, the program
terminates and shuts the computer down automatically.

I turned the computer monitor off and locked
the office door on my way out.

Hurrying down the hall, I glanced at my
watch. It was past three in the afternoon.

I hadn't called ahead because I didn't want
to alert or alarm anyone, but that did mean that this could be a
wasted trip. I hoped it wouldn't be.

I pulled up in front of the triplex or
whatever-plex it was. I think it was only three units in the
building, but I wasn't sure. Anyway, I was here.

I was struck at how similar the outside
condition of this building resembled the outside of the motel. It
had that same disrespectful lack of care look that I really
disliked.

The address said it was apartment three.
Three was up some stairs that ran up the side of the building, and
I went up them.

There was no doorbell, so I knocked. Probably
louder and harder than I needed to.

A girl opened the door. She was maybe twelve
or thirteen.

"Hi," she said and pushed some of the
boyishly cut blond hair out of her face.

"Hello," I said. "Is Carlie home?"

"Does she know you?"

"Nope."

"Is she expecting you?"

"Go get her, okay?" I said.

"Okay," she said. "Will you wait
outside?"

I nodded and the door closed. There was a
good chance she wasn't going to come back, but there was an even
better chance that I was going to stand here and keep knocking if
that happened.

However, the door opened a short time later.
A grown up version of the girl was standing there. She had the same
roundish face and longer, bowl-cut hairstyle. The same blond hair
and blue eyes, but it was darker or possibly dirty blue.

She was wearing a shirt that had the CarTech
logo on it. They were the largest employer in the area and had a
huge factory in town.

"What is it?" she asked and sighed.

I held my hand out. "I'm Ray Crusafi. Do you
have a moment?"

"For what?" She put her hands on her
hips.

I took my hand back and got a business card
out and silently handed over to her.

"You're a private investigator? Serious?" she
asked.

"Yes, I am," I said. "Can I talk to you?"

She looked suspicious. People do when I ask
them if we can talk and tell them that I'm a private investigator.
I'm used it, but I still notice it.

"What do you want to talk about?"

"Kelly Brandt."

She looked down at the girl. "Adrienne, go
inside." Then she closed the door behind her.

The little landing at the top of the steps
wasn't really big enough for the two of us. We could both stand
there, but it felt uncomfortably close.

"I don't know what to say, except how the
hell do you know that name?" she asked. "Were you watching? Oh,
that is sick!"

"Kelly is dead," I said and watched her. She
was good. I couldn't tell if I was telling her something she
already knew or not.

I waited for a question or comment but didn't
get any. So I had to continue.

"You do know who Kelly is?"

More silence.

"Did you know she died?"

"I think you should leave," she said.

"You were the last to see her alive," I said.
"I need more information. You could help with that."

"Goodbye," she said.

I dug in my pocket for the button and pulled
it out. "Does this belong to you?"

That arrested her motion of going inside. She
looked down at it and squinted, but the squinting wasn't necessary.
It was plenty big enough to see plainly. It was a giant button.

"No," she said. Then the door was open, and
she was inside. The door shut firmly, and I heard the deadbolt snap
into place.

That was that.

It would seem that I'm a lousy murder
detective. I really should be working on stuff that I'm good at,
like staking out a cheating husband, except I had no paying
customers for that right now.

Back down the stars I went and I decided to
head home.

I started my routine for going home. This was
always an exercise I did. I got out onto the main highway and
changed directions multiple times.

No one was tailing me. For fifteen years, no
one had tailed me, but the day I don't check . . . that will be the
day.

I sped out of town beyond my office building
and the traffic thinned out. It wasn't much past four in the
afternoon, and as it was also Monday, the rush hour traffic wasn't
bad. Plus, our little city of Muldove isn't much larger than fifty
thousand people, and it's hard to get much of a rush with that few
of people.

I continued to check the cars around and
behind me as I headed out. Five miles out, I passed the road that
went south down to my house. I overshot it and about half a mile
down, I parked my car in a truck stop gas station that always had
cheaper gas than anywhere else around.

This was one of the places I left my car, and
as it was busy twenty-four hours a day; my car wouldn't stick out
being parked here over night.

I got out and walked back to my road and then
I walked down it after again checking that no one was observing or
following.

It isn't legal to carry a concealed weapon in
this state. However, if given the choice between staying alive and
following the law, well, I think my choice was obvious.

If someone ever was following me, they'd get
a thirty-eight caliber bullet in them.

The house my wife and I shared wasn't far
down, and it took me only minutes to walk to it. There is a hill in
the side of our property, and our house was actually built right
into it.

It's technically an underground house, a
hobbit house. I prefer it because it's more secure. Only the front
of it is exposed with windows and a door. The back and sides are
buried under earth.